Rainbow Six Siege – In Depth: Hit Markers

Hey everybody Iceycat here, and today we’re going to be talking about hit markers so what’s the deal with hit markers? They were this really controversial thing when we first saw them – why? Because it reminds us of Call of Duty kind of gameplay mechanics , that’s sort of where we know hit markers from. Not sure if Call of Duty was the first game to do it or not, But the game certainly popularized it. Put it in everybody’s you know kind of the front of their mind , the front of their awareness and when we saw this we’re like, WOAH wait a minute! This has never been in a Rainbow Six game before this is the kind of thing that you can really use an unfair advantage to and we saw that in the closed alpha we would watch people shooting through walls and they’d see that little red X pop up and even though the had no line of sight on what they were shooting at they knew there was a target on the other side and so they would just dump their magazine into the wall and get the kill or I saw this several times – you’d have somebody hanging upside down on the rappel line and they would shoot from outside the window into the house and one of the really great things about the engine they have in Rainbow Six is that it differentiates between inside light and outside light so when you’re outside where the light is greater volume and intensity when you look in even those it’s not dark on the inside from the inside perspective, from the outside perspective it is.

It’s all shadowy and dark and you really can’t see what’s going on and you would see people kinda firing into this darkness from outside the house and boom – there would pop that little red X, and Oh! must be something there! And they would dump their magazine into it and get a kill and I would watch them and be like there’s NO way that person could actually see something that was in there but it was just the hit markers were kinda allowing them to cheat the system in ways you know like through walls or shooting into smoke or debris or you know other forms of concealment or darkness in the case I was just talking about and it was really allowing people to do kind of unfair things.

It was almost like magical knowledge you know that, there’s no way as an operator in the real world you actually have that knowledge of firing through a wall and knowing your bullet hit somebody that you couldn’t see on the other side of it unless you heard somebody scream out in pain. So, you know they decided – okay, well what we’re gonna do is we’re going to compromise with you on this we’re going to take out the enemy hit markers but we’re going to leave in the enemy DEATH hit markers so you’ll still get the red X on a death It’s a good compromise, I do have one concern with it in that is that with the down-but-not-out system the target can go down but not necessarily be dead and because you didn’t see that red X pop-up you’re going to know that you need to put some more rounds into the body and if you’re going slowly you would know this anyway even without hit markers if you’re moving slow and you’re taking your time you can see the animation change between a dead body versus a body that’s kinda propped up on it’s elbow and scooting around you’re going to notice that.

But if you’re going fast, if you’re trying to you know, move from one room to the other and go get the objective or go get the next guy and you went too fast you might not notice that difference between propped up on an elbow and actually completely dead and that red X death marker kind of gives you that knowledge that you might have otherwise missed and I’m a fan of situational in awareness in your environment I think that if you were going too fast you should pay a penalty in not being aware being caught by surprise I think that you should kind of have a certain level of accountability accompany the fact that you were not paying attention enough.

The other thing that kind of accompanies that and I guess hit death hit markers are a little redundant is that when you kill somebody that big thing comes up like 4 VS 3 or 2 VS 5 or you know whatever it might be so in a way it’s not giving you any less information we would have gotten already but in another way I’d rather you didn’t have the red hitmarker OR the popup but I digress on that point. None the less I’m happy that there aren’t the enemy hit markers for just the regular hits for the wall bangs and the shooting into the darkness and the smoke I’m happy that those are out and I’m so pleased that they listened to the feedback on that the kept in the white hit markers for friendly fire I’m okay with that.

That one I’m not too upset about you know it’s kinda good to know when you know oops sorry I thought you were on the other team. I do think that the better way to handle that is just make the team uniforms different colors you know team A is beige, team 2 is blue or you know whatever it might be I think having that as your visual difference in telling teams apart would be better and then if you did engage in some friendly fire then you weren’t paying attention and so that’s kind of you know, you kind of handicapped your own team by doing that so therefore you should be more observant. Again it comes the situational awareness but I’m okay with it. You know that’s one side the of the coin but the other side is that. Overall I’m pleased with what they did with hit markers the little things that are still in there – not that big of a deal, they really aren’t. We’re splitting hairs on things when we talk about the death markers or the friendly fire markers overall I am pleased that they listened to our feedback and they said “we hear you guys” yep we’re seeing some of these exploits in the closed Alpha play too we’re gonna change that and I’ve got to tip my hat to them.

They did excellent with listening to that end and implementing in taking care of it. So I think that’s kind of nothing but good things for them alright everybody, well thanks for watching and go ahead and like and subscribe for more we’ll catch you next time! your.